Christian Foundations Study

Tonight is the first Study in the new Christian Foundations Study we’re doing in Aurora. Its also the first adult Bible Study I’ve lead, so I’m a wee nervous. Not because I think I’ll fail but mostly because I’m used to questions that High Schoolers or Junior Highers/Middle Schoolers ask. I want this to be a great foundation study that will allow new/young believers to grow on. I’ve been a Christian since I was about 4 (I don’t know the exact date I asked Christ to be my savior – I don’t think I knew what a date was back then 🙂 ), but I’ve only grown as much as I have since I was about 20. Prior to that I was a a Christian without direction or understanding. I had been discipled some and had grown some but I had not been equipped. Having the understanding to start growing through your own personal study made things handy. What is amazing is how many times you get told ‘Read the Bible.’ when you really have no idea how to read the Bible and understand it. Not that the Bible is not understandable but that its an immense book with lots of styles of writing and topics in it.

You need to know how to identify various things that are historical, understand thte timeline of events so that you’re not just reading anything and trying to apply it to yourself. These are all things I hope to cover in the study, and I hope that those who attend find it fulfilling since I’m going to be pouring myself into it as best as possible.

Request for Clarification: Define Radical Right Wing Agenda

I was just on a website that had the term ‘Radical Right Wing Agenda’ as something they were fighting against. I consider myself conservative, but I don’t feel radical, I don’t lump myself into ‘right wing’ and I don’t feel like I’ve got an agenda [politically speaking]. However, I know that there are people out there that are matching the said title. I don’t know what that title references though, so if you feel like you’ve got a clear definition of this term, please leave it in the comments. I just want to understand if this is an actually small group like the people who put up godhatesfags.com, or are they referring to anyone conservatively oriented in general. The problem with these sorts of generalizations is that they require people to ask deeper questions to try to understand.

In my history classes we would use the term ‘platform’ to describe the agenda that a certain historical politician had. Is having an agenda bad? I don’t think so. Clearly the people whose site I was reading had an agenda, they were against something and wanted to stop that something from being propogated. I think that the talking heads, political analysts and radio show hosts need to be very, very careful when they speak of ‘agendas’ and various other ‘lumping’ terms that reduce people from being people to statistics, ‘us verses them’ or any other thing besides United States (or other country) citizens who hold beliefs that they, by United States Constitutional standards, have a God given right to hold.

So, with that in mind: what’s the definition, and is it a fair definition?

‘Tis the Season

One thing I find highly interesting about the web is that as the season’s change so do the searches. Sure, I get the usual search for pr0n and various other things like man breasts and what not. However, before Halloween comes I start getting search referrers for people looking for various costume ideas.

So, not to disappoint people looking for ideas, here are my top then list of things I’d like people to dress up as for Halloween:

  1. Window Blinds
  2. A cup of coffee. Not a paper cup, but a nice ceramic cup.
  3. A bass guitar
  4. A closet

Things you may not dress up as:
Napoleon Dynamite – this is the former stage name of Elvis Costello, and of course a movie character, its too easy, think harder.
Mr. T. – This guy will soon be selling geritol – lets move on.
Paris Hilton – going around naked might very well get you arrested.

National Treasure

Last night I watched National Treasure with Jessica. The movie was a light-hearted, nearly Indiana Jones-like treasure hunter journey. However, it was too light hearted and it became quite evident that the budget had dried up or the screenplay writer’s imagination had failed towards the end. The potential suspense at the end was replaced by a quick, easy-to-clean bit that left you wondering what really happened. Surely after such an adventure there would be more quality in the ending. But there wasn’t. Such is life – this is hardly a renter – save the $4.00 (or whatever your rental fee is, we use Netflix) and try something else – but if you have a choice between this and Eks vs Sever… get this.

A Night at the Ballpark

This evening Jessica and I joined Brian and Jillia and Brian’s brother and sister-in-law at Coor’s Field to watch the Rockies trounce the Dodgers (in inning 5) 11 to 1. It was like watching a baseball game except that instead of both teams playing it seamed that the Dodgers were on vacation and look-alikes were sent to pretend to play baseball. Actually, from the nose bleed seats we had, they could have been look-alikes and we’d not have known it.

Our nose bleed seats were so cheap that I can’t complain because if I did… I would be a bigger loser than the Dodgers. They were $1.00 each. That’s cheap. What was bad is that in the nose bleed seats there was lots of room for us to pick and choose since the actual seats we were assigned were 6 of thousands that were not being used. We sat in a row with no one else sitting there and just had a ourselves a good time watching the game. There were lots of empty seats to either rows above or below us. However, the Redneck Pharisees came and were quick to note that we were sitting in one of their purchased seats. So we moved. I point out that they were Pharisees because the Pharisees in the Bible were very legalistic and loved abiding by every rule so as long as they got their way 🙂 We weren’t trying to cheat, we were simply watching a baseball game and happened to sit in one seat that was theres – so we moved down two seats just to make sure they had room. One was dressed like a white rapper. Or what I would assume a white rapper might look like who was trying to look like a gangsta rapper who was scrawny… and white. The fake gold chains and the bandana underneath the camoflage hat were priceless. I need to get a camera phone so that I can document these things when I see them. They’re truly fantastic.

Then, during the game a Rocky was tagged out at third base. This caused the Redneck Pharisees to lose their minds as they screamed at the umpire for making a bad call. I don’t know about you, but when I’m hundreds of feet away (my guess is 300 or more – 91.44+ meters for the Metric folks) I don’t get too picky about the ornate details of things transpiring at said distance away from me. In fact, I’d let the umpire, who’s trained and standing within 10 feet of the base, make the call. However, this was totally unacceptable. I thought we might get the other seat back from them they were so chapped, however, they persisted in watching the game. While they persisted to watch the game they commented to one another about how pregnant Jessica looked. Brilliant.

The Redneck Pharisees have either not seen a short pregnant woman, or they wanted to make poor judgment calls of their own. Let me tell you that you shouldn’t constantly point out to a woman who is pregnant how big she looks. Don’t compare her to other pregnant women, don’t compare her to a whale, a super-model or anything else. Don’t compare her to her pre-pregnancy weight… don’t talk about it. Let her pregnancy belly be the 800 pound gorilla in the room that we’re all not talking about. It will be better for you.

We left in the 7th inning because it was obvious that the Dodgers hadn’t shown up for the game – we’d eaten our fill of $6.00 hot-dogs and drank enough $5.00 sodas [one, for the record]. So we left and picked up the Abigator from my parents. The Redneck Pharisees were climbing all over the seats to not have to walk down the isle in front of us since their seats that they were so desperate to claim were in the middle of the row… it was time to move on – so we did.

Good times. Thanks Brian and Jillia, Steve and Nicky and the whole slew of people that found doing the wave during the game was more fun than watching actually live out their namesake verb: dodging the ball instead of catching it and tagging people out.

No Chairs for This Table

I have submitted a table stylesheet to a new CSSZenGarden like site CSS Table Gallery. Their is nothing overly complicated about the style other than it uses some nifty CSS 2.1 selectors for standards compliant browsers (read: not Internet Explorer) to add an arrow next to the download links. In fact, let me outline the code I used:

tbody td a{
background: url(down_arrow.gif) no-repeat;
background-position: top left;
min-height: 20px;
padding-left: 20px;
float: left;
padding-right: 4px;
}
tbody tr th+td a{
background-image: none;
padding: inherit;
float: inherit;
}
/* Fake for IE, argh! Maybe IE 7 will resolve this. */
tbody td a{
_background: none;
_background-position: inherit;
_padding-left: 2px;
_float: inherit;
_padding-right: inherit;
}

The first rule adds the arrow to all links that are children of a regular table cell. This is a problem of course because we don’t want the download indicator next to the author links. Therefore we use the preceding sibling (+) selector in the second rule to find the section that is the table header cell (TH) and then remove the background image and download styling for that link. The third rule is a hack to get Internet Explorer to ignore the whole thing.

I like to style things in orange simply because my brother, Ed, likes orange 🙂 Yeah, I’m weird like that.

I used TopStyle Pro 3.12 to code this and Color Schemer Studio to grab complementary oranges.

Boot Faster!

You may have heard the story of Abraham and his promised son, Isaac, going to the computer store and buying all the parts to put together their own computer. When they got to the register Isaac noticed that they had not grabbed any memory chips. Disturbed by this he asked his father where they were. Abraham’s reply was, “God will provide the RAM.”

Enough really sad religious technology jokes.

I got 3 gigabytes of RAM for my desktop earlier this week. It now loads Windows XP with a 1.67 MHz AMD chip in about 15-20 seconds. Just about as fast as the Apple iBook laptop with 512MB of RAM 🙂 However, this thing whips through applications and allows me to record audio and videos in for clients like nothing else!

Beep… Beep… Beep… Beep

I’m in the process of backing up most of my data. Its going to take some time backing up gigs and gigs of photos and music to DVD’s, but I’d rather be able to restore my music and not lose my pictures rather than re-rip my CD’s and try to coerce animals at the zoo to pose like my old pictures.

Have you backed up lately? If not, why not find out how if you don’t know how, or do it soon so as to save yourself from a surprise down the road.

Say it Right Or Somebody’s Going to Have to Eat This 30 Year Old Twinky

I was just asked how to pronounce Evy’s Evie’s name. This is important to me since we’re not naming her Terry, Robin, Randy, Jessica or Mike. You may have thought that it was pronounced Evie like Levy [?v’?]. Oh, but you’d be wrong. It is pronounced like Evie like Stevie [?v?]. To help clear things up I have produced the following brief recording: evie.

Welcome to Earth, Gemma!

My buddy Dave and his lovely wife, Darlene, have a new baby girl, Gemma Lynn O’Hara. This makes them the parents of two very beautiful girls 🙂 I’m a day late in posting this, but there was some discrpancy on her name (from my sources since I missed Dave’s call yesterday while in the shower, I know, TMI). Congratulations, Makena, on being a big sister! Abby is jealously awaiting this role for Evie (yes, Jessica and I discussed this and the spelling is changing – all future references to this little girl will be with the ‘ie’ ending. Being a web developer I don’t like ‘IE’, but such is life ;)).